01.6

LISTENING TO SONGS OVER
AND OVER AGAIN

by Evans Wittenberg

My kind grandfather conveyed himself as a measured man, in the sense that everything appeared to be in proportion to everything else. He divided his aspects into sixteenths so that all the angles fit neatly together. An architect by trade, excess was scrupulously avoided by means of mechanical pencil and rubber eraser. But lurking behind this measure of composure, an indulgence in itself, was a pathos which never saw the light of day – not at least until he told me about his sudden onset of insomnia at the age of ninety-five.

After he passed away, we searched his little nursing home apartment for objects to either remember him by or to simply possess. In our pilfering, we came across a note card centered on his drafting table. In the practiced and immaculate script of an architect was the phrase,

LET IT GO

I can only assume, given that affliction of Southern restraint we know so well, that my grandfather’s note card epitaph was referring to his repressed anger, although at the time we assumed it was about his worry. Of the few items that I left with that day, purchased by means of an uncomfortable, obligatory entitlement from his humble nursing home apartment, was his modest Timex watch and a bottle of unused sleeping pills. Both I saved not to use, but as reminders of shared blood – the knowledge that despite all appearances, my woes are not so unlike his – both born out of the impossible attempt to account for all the angles and draft a complete house.

We joked that he did not age, he just became more organized, though never forgetting to pencil us in. He exercised on time, took his medications on time, socialized on time, and even died on time, not two months before Covid came to his hometown of Little Rock Arkansas. He lived by the Timex and worshiped the repetitive structure it so resolutely provided.

I recall once asking him about what music he and my grandmother enjoyed. He replied that when they were young, they loved dancing to Big Band, Benny Goodman stuff. But he said that when Elvis came along, the whole thing was spoiled, and they simply gave up music all together. This statement left my romantic sensibilities in utter disbelief.

* * *

I would hope that my habit of listening to a song over and over again could be seen as a beautiful kind of repetition, suggesting that I can really enjoy music and therefore really enjoy being alive. And I certainly feel alive when I indulge repeatedly in a very good song – typically an enlivening and expansive song. I may be rewarded with new layers or subtleties in the bass line or chord progression. And any lyrics exposed to the repetition may reveal more intimate metaphor. However, there is another less gracious but more worthwhile way to interpret my obsessive behavior. When I was writing the first sentence of this paragraph, I made a Freudian slip. The error occurred with the word “again,” which I initially and unconsciously wrote as “aging.” My intention was to cast the habit of obsessive song listening in a beautiful light, but what came out had something to do with getting older.

Obviously, I am aging and so are the songs. Despite so many repeated attempts, I have yet to isolate the essential quality or experience I am after. The closer I get, the further it recedes, like the vanishing point in a renaissance painting or a climber who reaches the summit only to become fixated on another mountain over the horizon. Perhaps I’ve got it already but then why do I keep listening? It might be helpful to know what it is that I am trying to capture, but this elusive object of desire is no easier to define than it is to obtain. Its definition is an impossibility, and its impossibility is its definition.

I sometimes smother myself in songs I love – like grandma’s broccoli smothered in Velveeta, it can easily be too much of a tasty thing. Of course, smothering is also a method of murder, and my incessant efforts to revivify a song often yield something dismembered, brainless, and zombified. The whole process becomes like a copy machine which only makes copies of its copies – degrading in quality with each repetition. Eventually, a weariness sets in.The musical notes turn to irritating flies, and I find myself off course and undone. Maybe VictorFrankenstein had a similar experience when he finally beheld his creation,

I had worked hard for nearly two years, for the sole purpose of infusing life into an inanimate body. For this I had deprived myself of rest and health. I had desired it with an ardor that far exceeded moderation; but now that I had finished, the beauty of the dream vanished, and breathless horror and disgust filled my heart.

(Shelly, 1818, pp. 58-59)

One way to read this story is to say that Frankenstein wanted something impossible, such as immortality, or the secret of life. And perhaps even more tragically, he wanted to manufacture a friend. His creature was the result of a misguided and terribly narcissistic quest – careful what you wish for Dr. Frankenstein. But another way to read the story is to say that Frankenstein tragically got what he wanted. And that getting what one wants almost always involves an element of displeasure, because the “ardor that far exceeded moderation” has ceased. Or to put it simply, what he really wanted was to keep wanting.

Psychoanalytically speaking, both versions are true. The first version, that of an impossible desire, is at least partly conscious. Like so many clever fools, Frankenstein wanted to discover something significant. But the other part, the pleasure Frankenstein found in self-deprivation, was unconscious. Otherwise, he would have realized that he was motivated by an ambition more monstrous than even his creation. A drive that would never cease and only find enjoyment through pain, loss, and sacrifice. A force Freud named death drive.

In his contentious work, Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud (1920/1955) formulated his theory of the death drive partly on the repetition compulsions of veterans afflicted with war neuroses, what we might today call PTSD, and also on the question of why there was often a reemergence of symptoms when a patient was about to terminate analysis. But he was also inspired by his infant grandson, who in representing his mother’s leaving and return, would cast a tethered spool away from him crying “fort” or “gone,” and then pull it back exclaiming “da” or “back.” Freud remarked, “As a rule one only witnessed its first act, which was repeated untiringly as a game in itself, though there is no doubt that the greater pleasure was attached to the second act” (p.15)

Perhaps like Freud’s grandson’s game, the habit of listening to songs over and over again can be divided into two related parts. The first part, the casting away, follows the logic of death drive where enjoyment is found through loss and suffering – a bizarre satisfaction in the repetitive, zombification of the song. But in doing so, the second part becomes available. The song is unmade so that something else, some “greater pleasure” can emerge. But what exactly is his greater pleasure?

In Lacan’s (1988) reading of Freud, death drive is placed on another register and interpreted in a way that is more enlightening our present analysis. Instead of death drive being a feature of living beings (an inherent determination to return to an inorganic state), Lacan believed death drive to be attributable to speaking beings. It was language, he insisted, which fundamentally barred the speaking being from its own unity, thereby creating a fundamental incompleteness or lack in the subject. Identities (architect, grandfather, therapist, patient), are provided by language – by the Other, which can also be expanded to mean culture, ideology, etc. But one can never experience themselves as equivalent to such identities, because these identities are themselves incomplete. It is as if the “real” architect, therapist, or patient is always somewhere else. And this somewhere else is the somewhere else that produces desire.

One way I seek to remedy this lack is through my love of music. I listen to say, an enlivening song, because I demand for the song in that particular moment to complete me – to provide an identity to an otherwise lacking being. And this is why I have many playlists, and oh how Spotify provides, ensuring phantasmatic completion across many instances of daily lack. A playlist for driving to work, for working, for driving home, for exercise, for cooking dinner, for sex. But the music never completes. For Lacan (1988), that is a structural impossibility. The obsessive behavior eventually collapses into a painful excess, into disappointment, into jouissance – proving that a subject cannot ever be rendered whole. Of course, it is this very incompleteness, this very lack, which initiated the desire for fulfillment in the first place. And so, the cycle recapitulates itself.

Death drive, according to Lacan (1988), followed a different logic from desire. Via the route of desire, pleasure is contingent on the quest for lusted after objects, although this is ultimately illusory because such objects never fulfill. Death drive, on the other hand, produces satisfaction by repeatedly missing the mark, by circling around and around the desired object, by failing at the impossible more slowly.

If what is ultimately wanted is to keep wanting, then the conditions of wanting must be continually reestablished. Perhaps an enlivening song provides a desired identity, an experience in which one can believe they are escaping their symbolic limitations (for example the identity conveyed by one’s job title), when in truth one remains firmly inside the symbolic constraints of such identity. It is only through the circular movement of the drive, through the repetitive mortification of the song that one may actually go beyond – and also beyond the very identity previously expressed by the song.

Consciously, I want to feel and experience the aliveness of the song, thereby filling a lack. But unconsciously, death drive mortifies and sacrifices the song, creating a blank slate on which a new field of desiring can occur. Hence the circular entanglement of desire and drive. Lacan (1988) reflected, “The drive of destruction calls into question all that exists. But it is equally a will to creation starting from nothing, a way to begin again” (p. 212). What is rendered by death drive is the very reemergence of the human subject.

Perhaps my grandfather’s symptom was his Timex and mine is my music. There are other songs to listen to, and there are other things to write about, just as there were other lives my grandfather could have lived outside his regimented schedule. And so, the matter comes down to that most brutal aspect of any creative project, finishing. For to finish means to stamp, to officiate, to relegate to the world. It means to take a project out of an open field of possibility, to castrate it and to turn it into a product. It also means the end of a repetitious reworking, of the satisfaction that comes from not finishing. I really would love to finish this essay, but the big problem is that I would rather it finish me.